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Wednesday, 12 April 2017

King Henry V - boys will be boys

The BBC History Magazine online site reproduces an article from 2013 by Prof. Anne Curry about the Royal apprenticeship of King Henry V during his father's reign and the stories about his dissolute behaviour before he became King. I have copied and pasted it, and added a few comments as an afterword:

Behaving badly: Henry V's misspent youth

He’s widely feted as one of England’s greatest medieval
kings but, for much of his early life, Henry looked more like a
dithering also-ran than a statesman in the making. Anne Curry explores
the growing pains of the hero of Agincourt.

This article was first published in the March 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine

On Friday 25 October 1415, in a muddy field in Picardy, the
reputation of Henry V as a great warrior king was sealed. His victory
over the French at Agincourt
had a major effect on his position both at home and abroad. Even before
he returned to England, a grateful parliament had granted him all
revenue from customs duties – a sizeable income – for life. As for the
French, they never again dared to face him in battle.

So Henry was able to conquer the whole of Normandy and advance on
Paris, exploiting the divisions in France – between the Burgundian and
Armagnac factions – that the defeat at Agincourt had exacerbated. The
treaty of Troyes, signed in May 1420, sealed Henry’s acceptance as
regent to Charles VI (‘The Mad’) and – through marriage to Charles’s
daughter Katherine – heir to the throne of France. It seemed only a
matter of time before he would rule over both England and France.
At the parliament held at Westminster in December 1420, the
chancellor explained why the English had “special cause to honour and
thank God” for the deeds and victories of the king. He had recovered the
ancient rights of the English crown in France. He had destroyed heresy
in the realm – a reference to his actions against Sir John Oldcastle and
the Lollards (critics of the established church) in 1414. And, in his
youth, he had put down rebellion in Wales.

In short, though Henry’s untimely death in 1422 curtailed the
fulfilment of his plans, his career was, on the face of it, a complete
success. As Thomas Walsingham, author of The St Albans Chronicle,
expressed in a panegyric for the dead king: “He was a warrior, famous
and blessed with good fortune who, in every war he undertook, always
came away with victory.”

But had Henry always been so successful? Let us reflect on Henry’s life before he became king.

This 15th-century
illustration depicts Henry, then Prince of Wales, paying homage to the
French king Charles VI. The Treaty of Troyes, signed in 1420, saw Henry
named Charles’s regent; by marrying the latter’s daughter, Katherine,
Henry secured his position as heir to the French throne. (Credit:
Bridgeman Images)

There are ample reasons to believe that Henry the prince was a far cry from Henry the king. In Henry IV,
Parts 1 and 2, Shakespeare portrays him as a medieval ‘hooray Henry’.
In those plays, the prince chooses bad company; though wealthy, he
prefers the low life and petty criminality; and it is only at his
father’s deathbed and his own subsequent coronation that he reforms
himself – becoming as excessively ‘correct’ as he was once so
‘incorrect’ for his social and political position. But was this fact as
well as Shakespearean fiction?

The first ‘published’ comments on Henry’s bad behaviour so far
unearthed appear in the Latin lives written about him in the late 1430s.
In the anonymous Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti (often called
the Pseudo-Elmham), Henry is described as being in his youth “an
assiduous cultivator of lasciviousness…passing the bounds of modesty he
was the fervent soldier of Venus as well as Mars; youthlike he was fired
by her torches and in the midst of worthy works of war found leisure
for excesses common to ungoverned age”. The work devotes much space to
his last-minute repentance to his father for his bad behaviour.

We could dismiss all of this as simply a good story – except that it
was dealt with at great length, and in a work known to have drawn
information from one of Henry’s courtiers: Walter, Lord Hungerford.
In another work, the Vita Henrici Quinti by Tito Livio
Frulovisi (now believed to have been derived from the Vita et Gesta),
stories of a misspent youth and late change of heart are shorter, but
remain. Given this work’s links with Henry’s last surviving brother,
Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and the status of both works as eulogies
for Henry V, we have to assume that the accounts of his youth are
basically true – as are those of the well-publicised change of character
at his accession.
There are many intriguing facets to Prince Henry. For one thing, he
had not been born to be king. Until just after his 13th birthday, in
September 1399, he was merely the eldest son of the eldest son of a
collateral line of King Richard II . He stood to inherit, in time, the
duchy of Lancaster created for his grandfather John of Gaunt (d.1399),
the third son of Edward III. He was also to be bequeathed the earldom of
Derby held by his father, Henry Bolingbroke (d.1413), and the titles
brought to the family by his co-heiress mother, Mary (d1394), daughter
of Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Northampton, Essex and Hereford (d.1373).

So the career that lay ahead for the “young lord Henry” or “Lord
Henry, son of the Earl of Derby”, as he is described in the financial
records of his father and grandfather, was that of a peer – but at the
time it seemed that he might have to wait many years for his
inheritance.

Tom Mison plays Prince Hal, with David Yelland as the old
king, in a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. The play
portrays Hal as a medieval ‘hooray Henry’. (Credit: Rex)

As it was, his life was completely transformed – first, in October
1398, by the exile of his father by Richard II; and then, the following
September, by Bolingbroke’s return to England and usurpation of the
throne as Henry IV.

On 15 October 1399, two days after his father’s coronation, Henry was
created Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall and Earl of Chester, and was
acknowledged as heir to the throne. Later in October, the title Duke of
Aquitaine was added and, on 10 November, that of Duke of Lancaster.

Given the fragile political position of the new dynasty, Prince Henry
was a vital cog in its establishment and, as such, shared in its
problems – indeed, he experienced them even before the usurpation. In
May 1399 the young Henry was taken to Ireland by Richard II , seemingly
in an attempt to ensure his father’s good behaviour. It failed: in the
king’s absence, Bolingbroke invaded England.

Education in arms

Henry was then 12 years old, an age at which it was customary for
noble boys to begin gaining experience of military service, though they
were not expected to actually participate in the fighting. So in the
summer of 1400 he was assigned a company of troops within the huge army –
over 13,000 strong – that his father took to Scotland.

Then, as the army returned to England, the Welsh revolt began. The
historian Adam Chapman has observed that it was no coincidence that
Owain Glyndŵr declared himself Prince of Wales on 16 September 1400 –
the 14th birthday of the formal holder of the title, Prince Henry. Only
six months later, the latter found himself involved in his first siege,
at Conwy.

It is not surprising that the teenage prince learned under the
tutelage of advisors appointed by his father. The young Henry held a
number of nominal commands but was always guided by others, including
Henry Hotspur, son of the Earl of Northumberland, and Hotspur’s uncle,
Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester, who was appointed Prince Henry’s
governor at the end of 1401.

Yet these were the very men who, in 1403, rebelled against Henry IV
and his son. So the battle of Shrewsbury on 21 July, when he faced his
erstwhile mentors, must have been a chastening experience for the prince
– not least because he was wounded by an arrow that pierced his left
cheek. The surgeon John Bradmore removed the arrowhead, but the wound
put the prince out of action for a year or so.

Even as Henry entered his late teens, his father was reluctant to
give him complete authority in the Welsh wars. The young prince was
neither wholly committed nor effective, and constantly complained of
being kept short of funds. Alongside praise for the prince’s good heart
and courage, the speaker of the parliament of March 1406 also urged that
he should maintain continual residence in Wales for the sake of the wars
– an indication that he had not been attentive to his duties.

All did not go well with the prince’s campaigns. In 1407, at the
siege of Aberystwyth, Henry theatrically negotiated its peaceful
surrender, withdrawing his troops; Glyndwˆ r, though, simply occupied
the castle. Aberystwyth remained in rebel hands until September 1408 and
was recovered, as was Harlech in 1409, not by the prince in person but
by those to whom he delegated.

This late 15th century illustration shows prisoners being
taken at Agincourt. Some of Henry’s earlier military endeavours had not
met with such success. (Credit: Alamy)

Sickly and sexed up

As the late Welsh historian Rees Davies observed, the prince’s
personal role in Wales was limited. Chroniclers of the wars scarcely
mention him at all. He seems to have preferred to stay in the relative
safety of the English border towns and, increasingly, to spend his time
in and around London.
In 1409 he was appointed constable of Dover Castle and warden of the
Cinque Ports but so far no evidence has been found to show that he went
to Dover or Calais, the captaincy of which he gained in March 1410. Yet
in 1412, the prince was investigated for misappropriating the garrison’s
wages.
The overall impression formed from the sources is that King Henry IV
was slow to let his son have his head, but that, as the prince grew up,
his father could not hold him back. It is notable how, once he turned
21, Prince Henry began to build up his own support. Fifty-one new grants
of annuities were made in the year following Michaelmas 1407, a big
increase on the average for the previous six years of less than ten.

Many of Henry’s circle were nonentities, which fans the notion that
he associated with unsuitable people. It also seems that he promoted
favourites such as Thomas, Earl of Arundel, and Richard Courtenay, whom
Henry had appointed as bishop of Norwich after his accession. Comments
made by Courtenay in 1415 tell us that Henry suffered from being
overweight and in bad health, and that he was of the opinion that there
were no decent doctors in England.

There’s more evidence for a sickly Prince Henry in his household
accounts listing purchases of medicines. These records also suggest that
he may have lived beyond his means, partly because of the large
payments he made to retainers. Thomas Walsingham speaks of his retinue
in 1412 being “larger than any seen before these days”. Intriguingly,
too, in 1415 Courtenay observed that Henry had not had sexual relations
with any woman since he came to the throne – the implication being that,
as the Vita et Gesta suggests, he had been notably promiscuous before
his accession.

As prince and heir, we would expect Henry to have had a place on the
royal council. This was the case from at least the end of 1406, when he
was 20. As the medievalist Christopher Allmand observes, Prince Henry
attended a good proportion of meetings but was increasingly advancing
the interests of key friends and relations – including his father’s
half-brother, Henry Beaufort – and challenging the power of the
chancellor, Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury. Indeed, Henry’s
growing influence may have contributed to Arundel’s decision to resign
from the chancellorship in December 1409.

Henry married Katherine of Valois, daughter of Charles VI
of France, on 2 June 1420. This painting of 1487 is from the Chroniques
de France ou de Saint Denis. (Credit: AKG images)

Yet, in November 1411, it seems that the prince’s influence over the
council abruptly ended. There is no doubt that Henry’s relations with
his father, and with his brother, Thomas, were bad: there were major
differences of opinion on foreign policy, and a study of diplomatic
relations with Burgundy suggests that the prince was making offers he
was simply not entitled to issue. He was also outraged not to be chosen
to lead an expedition to Aquitaine in the summer of 1412.

The seriousness of the situation is reflected in a letter sent by
Prince Henry from Coventry on 17 June 1412, a missive that was clearly
intended to reach a wide audience. It addressed rumours accusing him of
plotting to rebel against his father and seize the throne.

Father and son became reconciled but, according to the chronicler
Thomas Walsingham, Henry IV refused to punish immediately those who had
spread the rumours; instead, he ordered that sanctions should wait until
the next parliament, when they could be tried by their peers. This
could only mean that the prince’s detractors were noblemen.
Interestingly, the Latin lives made much of Henry’s last-minute reform
and confession to his father – does this suggest that, despite his
protestations, he might have had a guilty conscience?

Henry the prince emerges as a complex character: not always living up
to expectations, making enemies and choosing unsuitable friends. He was
brave but flawed, and always prioritised his own desires. Six centuries
after he assumed the throne, it’s worth remembering that the road to
his achievement as all-conquering hero of Agincourt was often a rocky
one.

Professor Anne Curry is the dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Southampton.

The Clever Boy thinks both those pieces are interesting, but not without error in the first case and being somewhat tendentious in the second - a point picked up in the comments section - and makes little allowance for stories of a dissolute youth.

He would also point out the error in the illustration in the main text of Henry as Prince of Wales paying homage to King Charles VI - the only possible such event would be when as King Henry V under the Treaty of Troyes in 1420 he was recognised as Duke of Normandy and Heir to King Charles for the French realm. This is a serious error in ascription.

Otherwise this is a very interesting article by a distinguished historian of the period, and the pity is that it is not longer. Were it so then it could have included the story of the Prince being committed to prison by Chief Justice Gascoigne for contempt of court when the Prince turned up and demanded the release of one of his retainers. These and similar stories may have been preserved by the family of the Earl of Ormonde who himself was part of Henry's circle. A discussion of the emotional reconcilation with his father at Westminster late in 1412 would also have been interesting - it certainly suggests the Prince exploiting the situation for all it was worth in offering his dagger to his father to kill him there and then if he considered him disloyal.The facial injury in 1403 at the battle of Shrewsbury was more serious than this article might suggest. It was life-threatening, and maybe life-changing for the teenage Prince. I shall post about that later on in the year.

If this article's assessment of the future King is correct then it makes his achievement as monarch all the more notable and reveals something of his character after 1413 as well as before. Shakespeare's portrayal may be closer than historians have thought, and what one sees is a King determined to fulfil his responsibilities despite or in reaction to his inclinations as a young man. These two aspects make him more completely human both in his limitations and in his successes.